


The Throb

by stellar_lasers



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: F/M, Other, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 06:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20484704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellar_lasers/pseuds/stellar_lasers
Summary: Cabal is feeling a little distracted from his work. Could the demon of lust in his spare bedroom be to blame?





	The Throb

**Author's Note:**

> A.K.A. The Bucket of Horrors  
With all due respect to J. L. Howard, Johannes Cabal is sexy boy and needs some love.

The throbbing began in his dream and wouldn’t quit.  
A throb and a tap, tap, tap, something drumming on the wooden floor. In perfect synchronisation with the pulse slogging around his sleeping body. His heart, tap. Blood tingling in his fingers and his feet. A twitch of a pulse at his throat. His skin felt clammy, too hot under layers of blankets. But it was only when his blood reached his belly it became hot.  
Hot, hot enough to scald. Hot enough that it started to smoulder, and the smoke flowed through his veins back to his heart, and he coughed as the smoke reached his lungs and sat bolt upright with his heart beating painfully hard and sweat coursing down his body, his hair soaked wet.  
Johannes Cabal, necromancer, felt the breath fall hot from his lips. Doing his best not to pant, blinking at the sun-streaked wall opposite the bed, he reached under the sheets.  
A groan escaped him as his thumb grazed his erection, the muscles of his shoulders pinched together. Another night, another dream. Half-remembered, better forgotten. All that lingered was the scent of musk and sex, the desire for more. Cabal rubbed an experimental hand over his cock. A shudder ran the length of his spine. He wrenched his hand away and rolled out of bed with a growl, not half as composed as was seemly.  
He shoved his feet into the slippers by the bed and stalked as only a true predator can stalk in slippers to the hallway and then down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. The big old house was alone in the valley and he was alone in the house. It had been that way for a long while now and it would continue for a while more, until his work was done. He was alone, but that didn’t mean he intended to brush away any blow to his pride as inconsequential. He refused to look down at the irregular bump in his flannelette pyjama pants. That damn flannelette. He was acutely aware of it touching his skin.  
Damn it and curse it, pride be forgotten. He should just get it over with, of course. He should give into it. While he was not a man given to carnal pleasures, Cabal could admit this that particular urge was one best quickly seen to and driven away. But the dreams had plagued him for a fortnight now, and they didn’t care if they visited at night or a nap or a daydream. Leaving vague after-impressions of thick legs and swaying breasts, skin sliding against skin, heat and sweat and mess and stretching limbs and throaty moans. Always rousing him with the sweat on his skin, the hard pump of his heart, and of course, the throb.  
The dreams had turned what had long been mechanical habit into a rushed grab and lustful panting, his sensitivity as well as his dignity out the window as he strove only to release that sweet, intolerable tension. Alas, they were not going away. They were becoming quite the distraction. And the solution – well. That was becoming less and less satisfying. A cause for concern indeed. Johannes Cabal was a necromancer, but he found the dead far from romantic. Sating his lust with something more than his hand and imagination would require a living, breathing, willing participant, and given his reputation in the area, that would mean visiting the city to find a prostitute.  
The thought of that bothered him for two reasons. One, he would be required to take leave of his work to visit the city, and he generally despised the city. Two, he could remember in great detail the last time he had lain with a woman, and it had been a long damn time ago. Long enough that while he was entirely sure the mind remembered it perfectly, he was less convinced the body had remained in functioning order. One may assume that in Cabal’s line of work the list of things he was not willing to do was quite small, however “Be made a fool of by a prostitute” certainly had its place on the list.  
Besides. He had promised to stay alone.  
No, no, he would deal with this his way. A cold bath, a day of hard work, and he would be back to normal.

Purple tinged thighs, pale underneath. Her pubic mound covered in a vector arrow of soft, dark hair, her belly curved, waist tight. Her thick legs wrapped around him, hips riding him, her plump purple arms caught in a nest of wild black hair. She moaned as she tossed back her head, exposing the long line of her throat. His hand was on her stomach; she grabbed it and squeezed it over one soft, heaving breast.  
His back arched, his pulse throbbed in time with the movement of her hips. Her breasts were pale, a white worn by no human woman. The dancing nipples were mauve. He felt one between his fingers, rolled it between thumb and forefinger. Her breath hissed between small white teeth. She liked that. His free hand rose from the bed to her hip, travelling slowly upwards. He would give her more of what she wanted. She felt so good, so good, on top of him. Riding him so roughly, he’d be bruised in the morning. Didn’t matter. He wanted more. Her wet pussy sucked at his cock with each thrust of her hips. A rolling motion, a wave on top of him, drawing him in piece by piece. He would give her what she wanted. He knew just what she wanted. He wished she would give him something more.  
The demon caught his hand in hers and her head snapped down. Gleaming yellow eyes met his. Those full, dark purple lips moved in gorgeous symbols. But what she said didn’t match up at all.  
“Tap, tap, tap-tap, tap.”  
Cabal swore as he hit the floor on his back, scrambling upright even as his inertia scattered him over the floorboards. He bent, hands on knees, panting hard. His breath wasn’t all that was hard. A precursory glance at his crotch confirmed that. He was in the attic, in the laboratory. It was dark. He’d fallen asleep at the desk. Irritation surged through him. Forcing himself to stand properly and move to the desk, his hands shaking as he righted the tin of pencils and the notebooks he’d strewn when he fell.  
Which really begged the question, why had he fallen asleep to begin with? Cabal viewed sleep with much of the same loathing as he regarded lust. He shouldn’t have needed rest until dawn at the earliest. But now ... he glanced at his notes.  
He frowned. He could have sworn he’d been working on the finer points of another formula. A few scribbles of chemical tests to be performed the next day were all that clutched the page. Cabal flipped backwards through the book. There was yesterday’s date, another despairingly small amount of notes. He hadn’t even been transferring his day notes over to his permanent records lately. What he’d come up with didn’t seem worth the effort.  
He glared at his crotch. “This is your fault. Don’t tell me you’re broody.”  
His crotch remained characteristically silent.  
Cabal’s will wavered. He glanced around the attic. He’d resolved to ignore his body’s yearnings, and he never made resolutions lightly. But surely it was better to spend ten minutes now than ten hours later making up for lost work.  
His hands were on the button of his slacks when he heard the noise.  
Tap, tap, tap-tap, tap.  
His hands flew up as if accused. Cabal looked towards the windows, but they were all secured. His heart danced a strange rhythm. His subconscious prickled him. He crossed slowly to the windows, checked every one. Again, the tapping, but this time he recognised it was distant, downstairs somewhere.  
He spent the next quarter hour checking every window in the house. He didn’t hear the tapping again, and he secured every shutter. His subconscious hadn’t let up, but Cabal was far from patient, and he pushed away the nagging suspicion that he should check the house again in favour of returning to the attic.  
There he sat at the desk, staring at the few notes he’d made on the page.  
They weren’t even particularly good notes.  
“Burn experiment 389 to test calorific value?” Cabal looked at the words in disgust. What value at all could such a test be? He considered tearing out the page and stuffing it in the trash, but the thought caused him a crush of shame and he resigned to crossing out the line instead.  
His left hand tapped his knee.  
Cabal frowned at the page. He willed the details of the experiment to mind. His fingers tapped his thigh.  
He had all the notes written in the record in the desk drawer, but he should have had the details committed to memory. He refused to look at the record. His wrist brushed his crotch, and his abdomen pulled in tight.  
“Verdammt!” he tossed the pencil at a stack of books. The pencil flipped up over the books and rattled on the floorboards. Cabal swung out of the chair and sent it crashing to the boards after the pencil. He took the notebook and in a fit flung it across the attic. It hit a window and disappeared behind a low shelf.  
Leaving a string of exotic curses in his wake, Cabal paced to and fro in the attic. He retrieved the notebook only to throw it again. His pulse throbbed, his cock throbbed. He didn’t want to touch it. The skin of his belly crawled and he wanted someone else to touch him so badly that he yelled in frustration.  
“Is that it?” he shouted at the notebook lying forlorn by the wall. “You think I need someone? Is that it?”  
Well, the notebook was wrong. His cock was wrong. He didn’t need anyone. He hadn’t needed anyone in years. He had everything he needed, and he was not going to the city to be made feel foolish by some cheap harlot. He was not.  
His pacing slowed. Cabal clutched at the skin over his stomach. That flicker of fire was agonising, feeding the throb that was driving him mad. Desperation for someone else, another human being who wanted him. He caught sight of his face in one dark window. Pale and grim and fever-eyed, stooped, his short blond hair a spiky mess. The evil scientist. The twisted necromancer. He smothered a hand over it and straightened forcibly. He ran his hands over his white shirt a few times, adjusted his braces. His reflection went from mad scientist to a troubled young doctor. The change calmed him, but did not quell the fire in his belly. He had to do something about it. Had to, or risk losing his mind for real. Fine. He would go to the city. He would find a whore. And he would fuck her and sate the throb and it wouldn’t count against him because at the end of the day he would still be alone.  
And that’s when he heard it.  
The tap.  
Coming from somewhere downstairs.  
Cabal grit his teeth. He turned on his heel and stalked for the staircase. It was the middle of the night; he would leave for the city in the morning. Until then, there was no chance he would risk sleeping just to wake up sweating and groping at himself again. He would silence that cursed tap instead.  
He paused on the second storey landing. The walk down the steep attic stairs had apparently overexerted him; his heart drummed too quick, his breath came shallow, his guts felt tight. He listened. The tap, down the hall. He followed it to his bedroom, peered inside. The tap came again, but it was downstairs further, in the room beneath his.  
Cabal moved to the bed, to his Gladstone bag, and removed his handgun. This he tucked into his pants and hurried down the hall, down the stairs to the first floor. He was sweating, he could almost smell the musk and the sex in the air. He was obsessed, completely involuntarily obsessed. His mind kept flicking through images of heavy bouncing breasts, mauve nipples between his fingers, a white throat and tangled black hair. Feet pressed against the underside of his thighs. Sweat drenching his body. Her tongue in his mouth. Grotesque, compelling. The sweat wasn’t all his. It belonged to her. The fire in his belly had consumed her too, she was burning with it. She pressed herself against him and her teeth found his neck, and he felt the first real thrill systematically convulse his muscles from head to toe.  
Disgusted, intrigued, Cabal shoved the thoughts away. He was approaching the room now. He kicked off his slippers and approached cautiously, barefoot, silent. Tap, tap from the other side of the door. He gripped the handle, swung the door inwards. He wrenched the handgun from under his belt, training it on the middle of the room as his free hand flicked on the light.  
She sat there, in the middle of the room, in a circle of white fire and arcane symbols scratched into the floor, entirely sedate.  
“Took you long enough,” she said, her voice throaty and low. Her dark purple lips curled in a smile. Yellow eyes flashed flat white against the light. She rose lightly to bare feet. All of her was bare. The succubus from his dreams.  
“Yes, well,” Cabal coughed. He lifted his eyes from her sumptuous body to her face. He brought up the handgun. “You’ve distracted me for long enough. Time to go back to hell.”  
The white fire flickered out as the succubus crossed it. Her hips swayed as she walked, her breasts bobbed gently. In a second she was there, her hands on Cabal’s hips, her chin on his chest, looking up at him. Her arms snaked around his waist, but she didn’t fool him; she had him pinned. Worse, his arms were jammed against the centre of his body. Even that minor contact through his slacks was making it difficult to think.  
The succubus purred, “But you summoned me, master.” She stepped aside and Cabal shuffled along with her. She shoved him against the wall and he couldn’t help the arch of his back as she pressed against him, as she pressed him harder against himself. She wet her lips with a mauve tongue, her eyes gleamed. “You need me.”  
Yes, yes, he did need her. He needed to push her down to the floor and strip off these heavy clothes and then fuck her, plough her until she cried out for him. He needed his body to be against hers. He needed it very, very badly.  
He gulped. His left hand had some space to wriggle free; he slipped it from the succubus’s grasp. The handgun in his right hand pressed to his thigh. He let it drop to the floor with a clunk.  
“You’re the one who tapped?”  
She smiled. It wasn’t kind, but it was a smile that said she wanted him. “You tapped. Desire, baby. You’ve been cooped up here too long by yourself. Cold boy, you can’t deny your lust forever.”  
Cabal’s mind buzzed. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. This lust was driving out all sense and reason. He should vanquish her and be done with it. Why had he dropped his gun? Not to mind, he had a hand free, he could push her away and-  
“I’ll make you a deal,” said the succubus sweetly. She slid a hand into his slacks and Cabal forgot all about pushing her away. “I’ll let you fuck me if you let me birth an army from your seed.”  
Cabal recovered himself. He straightened. “My seed? Excuse me, but if you’re going to reduce this to vulgarities, have the decency to refrain from banal vulgarities.”  
She popped the button of his slacks from its loop, slid the zip to the end of its tread. His heart skipped, kerosene drenched the fire in his belly and the flames roared tall and fierce. He let her have his hips, let her free his shirt tails from his slacks. Let her unhook one brace and then the other, his back curling against the wall as she drew his cock into her hands. He was hard, but not completely, in that stage where he was as big as he got but without being fully rigid.  
The succubus crouched, rolling her hands over his cock in admiration. She ran her tongue over her teeth. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”  
Her tongue flickered across the tip and Cabal groaned softly. He had both hands free now, he could have wrung her neck. Instead his fingers tangled in her hair, and he drew her closer to him, her skin against his skin, letting her accommodate his cock in her soft, warm mouth.  
A tug on his balls encouraged him to look down. The succubus drew back slightly, enough to take his cock from her mouth and to lie it against her cheek instead as she spoke. “So? Do you agree? Master?”  
“Master” was delivered without much conviction. Not even Cabal could deny who was controlling this interlude. He would have to make some major changes to the details if he were to retell the story later.  
“I’m not giving you anything,” he told her, even as smoke filled his blood and flickered in his voice. “I told you, go to hell.”  
The succubus snarled. A rope of something – a tentacle, shot from her shoulder and in a flash Cabal was skidding on his back through the hallway, a hole blown through the wall. He rolled onto his feet as the succubus stalked through the new door, four of the thigh-thick tentacles writhing behind her.  
“If I can’t have it, I’ll take it!” she spat and leapt for him.  
Cabal twisted and ran. His slacks slipped, he grabbed them and yanked them up and cursed the loss of his braces, which now smacked against the backs of his legs. He skidded onto the landing, ducked as a tentacle thrashed towards him and blew out part of the railing instead of knocking him over the landing. He wrenched the braces from the back of his slacks and flicked them at the succubus. She snatched them from air and flung them to the floor, and lunged up the stairs after Cabal.  
Barefoot, his shirt tails flying, his cock throbbing hard and uncomfortable in his undone slacks, Johannes Cabal raced up two flights of stairs. His one grace over the succubus was his size; he was long-legged and lean, she was muscular and short, and his long easy strides carried him up the stairs faster than hers.  
Still, there was little lapse between them. Cabal jumped onto the attic stairs and a tentacle exploded the step immediately below his. He twisted and jumped, catching the empty end of the cavity into the attic, pulling himself up as the succubus wrenched the entire attic staircase from its hinges and crumpled it into splinters.  
Cabal dragged himself onto the attic floor. He staggered up, heart in his throat, racing to the shelves lining one wall, looking for something, anything to help him. A dozen experiments sat in various decanters along the shelf. Cabal ignored them all and reached for the salt. He had the shaker in hand, ready to attack, when the succubus burst not through the empty stairwell but the floor right under his feet, hurling him into the air and then slapping him down again with a tentacle like the kick from a draft horse.  
He struck the floor on his shoulder, and this time wasn’t nearly so quick to rise. He blinked, his vision doubled. The salt shaker rolled from his hand of its own accord. He counted two arms, two legs, but they were twisted everywhere, the commands were all back-to-front.  
Dizzily, Cabal slapped his hand to the floorboards, getting the other elbow beneath him. He hadn’t gotten any further than that when a foot lodged in his side and he sprawled over again.  
The succubus ground her foot down on his solar plexus. His vision was still blurry, but Cabal had the distinct impression that she was smiling.  
“Ready to agree yet?” she purred.  
“Go ... to hell.”  
That flicker of teeth again. A tentacle snaked around Cabal’s neck. The succubus stepped lightly from his chest and the tentacle dragged him into the air. The succubus smiled up at him. Her lithe hands ran over his hips, up his chest, resting on the top button of his shirt. She undid it and said, “You need to start agreeing.”  
“Never.”  
The word was rasped from lack of air and Cabal wasn’t certain it was intelligible. The succubus understood him all right. She undid his second button and licked the hollow of his neck, savouring the salty taste of his sweat on the tip of her tongue.  
“I mean it, sweetheart,” she crooned. The third button sprung undone. “Don’t make me kill you for it.”  
“Don’t want ... an army.”  
The succubus clucked her tongue. The tentacle unwrapped from Cabal’s neck and he crumped on the floor. The succubus crouched over him, spreading him out, sitting on his hips. She rocked back and forth experimentally, rolled her eyes as he groaned and flexed against her. She leant close, her teeth grazed his ear, her breath mingled with her words and made them hard to understand. “Tell you what, sweetheart; let me cut you a deal.”  
“Never.”  
“You said that already.”  
Cabal was quiet. The succubus withdrew, shimmied down the length of him, her legs wrapped tightly around his knees, her fingers loosing his fourth button.  
She continued, “Six hundred seconds. If I can’t get you to come in six hundred seconds, you can go free.”  
She opened his shirt. His body was drawn taut below his ribs, making a deep, smooth hollow before the rise of his strong, lean stomach. He was thinking only of her. How he wanted her, how he would deny her.  
“And if ... I win?”  
She smirked. “You’re so frigid, honey, you won’t get anything by winning. But you have my word I won’t take your seed.”  
Cabal groaned. Always better to play on injury. “Deal. Start counting.”  
He wasn’t badly hurt, but he was about fifteen seconds from coming. It wasn’t much of a deal, but it was the best he was going to get.  
The thick rope of a tentacle snaked around his wrists, pinned them over his head. Elbows facing the ceiling, too much pressure, hurt his shoulders. That was good. Focus on the pain. He tried. He tried not to think about the succubus drawing his slacks down, tongue lapping the head of his cock. He tried not to feel her breasts against his legs. He tried not to imagine his pulse feeding the fire in his belly, incinerating the last threads of his control.  
He tried, and for a while, he succeeded. He felt good. He felt very good. His cock in her mouth – don’t think about that. That was lust, that was satisfaction. But it wasn’t enough to make him lose his mind. The mad scientist, the doctor, don’t let the madness take control. He kept counting down the seconds. Five hundred. Four hundred. Three hundred. Halfway there. Focus on the count. Let her push his cock between her big soft tits. Focus on the count. Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t enough.  
“You’re tough.” The succubus frowned. She looked up the length of Cabal’s body at him, eyes closed, breathless, counting. He wasn’t listening. She pinched his thigh, and he gasped and his spine curled and his legs pulled straight. The succubus’s frown deepened. Then she smiled.  
“Ooh. I get it.”  
She crawled over him, gripping his cock firmly between her fingers, her other hand parting the lips of her pussy. She was wet, she was always wet when it came to her favourite business. She spread her fingers wide as she pressed against Cabal, smirked at his cry of betrayal as she took him into her. He was big and he felt good, she moved up and down a few times to accustom herself to his size before taking him completely into her pussy. Her feet wrapped under his thighs, she rode him gently up and down. She watched him frown, watched him try to count, even as his hips rose to meet her small motions. He wanted her, he wanted her badly. And she would have him.  
The succubus raked her fingernails over Cabal’s ribs. His breath hissed, he opened his eyes, cold and blue and full of smoke. She clawed him harder, her curved nails drawing thick pink lines down his side, her breath huffing, bouncing as she did. A sound fell from his throat, he squirmed beneath her. The ache in his shoulders felt more like a tease. She rode him harder, fucked him harder, and now she scratched and pinched him and twisted his flesh, her tits squashed against his chest, her teeth found his throat, and she sunk her teeth into him hard enough to make him bleed.  
Johannes Cabal had lost all sense of time. He had been counting seconds. Now each second throbbed across his mind in an exploding star of pleasure and pain. The pain was exquisite, the pain sent thunder through the centre of him, even as waves of heat rolled through his body. He thrust into the succubus, hearing the wet slap and slurp of her pussy, watching her dark body undulate above him, felt the heat between them when she leant over him. Pain exploded through his neck and he wasn’t sure it wasn’t pleasure.  
Whatever dark thing lived in the most carnal recesses of his mind ripped through the final shreds of his control. He laughed, dark and bitter, let her tear his skin, revelled in the sweet, hot bursts of pain, breathing, slapping, pulsing, fucking. Cabal wrenched his arm free of the tentacle, bent one leg and rolled the succubus off him and onto her back. The tentacle slipped away and he spread her legs with both hands, palms pressing into her thighs. Her pussy was slick, ready, his cock soaked. He pushed into her, took a couple of strokes to find his rhythm, then moved over her, steadying himself with a hand beside her head, which curled into her hair and brought her mouth to his. It had been a very long time since he kissed someone and his teeth hit her lip, and her tongue in his mouth was unpleasant, but then there seemed to be some rhythm to that too and he kissed her hard, desperately, holding her as he fucked her and she dug her nails into his skin and bit his lip and caused him a hundred other burning stars of pain.  
His body tightened, his balls most of all. He felt the pressure shift in his cock. He had never felt this good. He didn’t care if she made an army of darkness or rainbows or kittens or unspeakable monsters of the abyss. He was going to come in her and her pussy tightening around his cock was testament to the reciprocation of her desire.  
She wanted him. Oh fuck, she wanted him.  
Somebody wanted him.  
Johannes Cabal wrenched himself away from the succubus, slipping in his haste and thumping down on his ass. He pushed a hand through his hair, found it damp with sweat, his and hers. His tongue tasted her scent in his mouth, his blood in his mouth. The air was full of the musky, salty scents of sex. Such a heady perfume. Every part of his body pulsed, heavy in his belly, in his throat where she had bitten him. A shudder ran through him, chattering his teeth, and he scrambled backwards across the floor away from her.  
He was alone. He had promised he would stay alone.  
The succubus crawled towards him, a woman, a monster, and though Cabal tried to push her away, he was scattered and she was focused, and she shoved him against the floor and stroked his cock with her tongue, fingers pinching the delicate skin of his thigh, took him into her mouth again and sucked and licked until the building heat burst from him, spilling into her mouth.  
He swore a curse so black and so heartfelt that half the plants in the garden immediately died. He didn’t know about the plants and wouldn’t have cared if he had known. He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. His hands were free; she hadn’t needed to bind him to convince him to stay. He grabbed his hair, he pushed at his face, but the pleasure was intense. His body writhed on waves of it, a great rippling satisfaction which took him and made his every limb tremble and dragged a rasping moan from his throat.  
The succubus sat up, wiping her mouth. Her tongue flicked over her lips. She swallowed. Cabal regarded her in frank despair. She slapped his thigh, pink with scratches.  
“Time’s up. You won.”  
He was shivering, distraught. He’d broken his only promise. It took him several attempts to say, “What do you mean? I clearly lost.”  
She shrugged. “You don’t know much about anatomy. Swallowing is hardly going to get me pregnant. No pregnancy, no demon army.”  
But she. She could have...  
Cabal sat. All the heat had left him. Goose bumps rose on his skin, he rubbed his arms. He felt something even colder pressed against his leg, and reached down to find the salt shaker. He lifted his chin. Mustering the strewn remains of his dignity, he spat sourly, “For the last time, get out of here.”  
She winked. Cabal had the salt shaker in hand, but the succubus wasn’t afraid of being vanquished now. She rose gracefully, unhurriedly. “I thought I might come back, try again. I will, if you don’t stop being so frigid. All those repressed desires will summon me again.”  
Cabal growled. He stood over her. “Not verdammt likely.”  
Her finger poked his stomach. “That’s up to you, lover. Until then ... it’s been fun.”  
She disappeared in a flash of white fire before Cabal could upend the shaker on her.  
He spent a minute making sure she was gone. When he was sure she was, he surveyed the damage to the attic. Busted staircase, hole blown in the floor, unseemly wet patches on the floorboards. He sighed. That demon was bent on keeping him from his work.  
He looked down at himself, soaked in sweat and other things, exhausted and bloody and bruised. It may have been the trick of a lonely mind, but he suddenly didn’t feel so cold. In fact, he felt the distinct warming glow of satisfaction spreading through him. He had broken his promise, of course. But every experiment has its failures, every marathon of human endeavour has its broken ankles. He would just have to make sure it never happened again.  
Johannes Cabal buttoned up his slacks, left his shirt open, and went to draw a bath.


End file.
